Couple of weeks ago I had to render a project that took around 24 hours although it was around 50 sec or so. And all the plugins used in there was pre-rendered so ease the pain of my computer... Specs are Xeon Quad Core 2.6 GHz with 6 GB RAM with Nvidia Quadro FX 3800 video card.. Then a few changes was to be made just hours before the deadline and I had to contact a render farm to handle the job.. Which made me think I should be changing things in my setup...

After being in so many forums 2 alternate solutions appeared:

1. Improve my network to do a network render then I can utilize my 20 other PCs to help render (each is Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM)

2. Add more GPU power on the local machine to help render faster..

If 1 is chosen then

a : I must upgrade my switch to a GigE swiwtch to help the traffic. ~ 348 $

b : I must buy an additional high end NIC card with 4 ports to provide a 4Gb/s bandwidth which is actuaaly 1 Gb/s with a regular GigE card. ~ 285 $

c: I must also change my hard drive setup to an SSD (2x 180 GB Intel 520, each providing 6Gb/s) or 2 x 15 RPM (2 x 300 GB Seagate, each with around 4Gb/s) drives with RAID 0 or 1 system to make the reading of off there as fast as possible. SSD ~ 600$ and 15K ~ 491$

[Walter Soyka]"First, buy more RAM for your workstation. 6 GB is nowhere near enough. If you upgrade to 24 GB, you can use multiprocessing very effectively on a 4-core machine."

I already did and now I have 18 GB RAM.

[Walter Soyka]"Second, carefully evaluate your workflow. For example, rendering to image sequences instead of a movie allows you to re-render only the changed frames for small edits."

I already did that too.

[Walter Soyka]"Network rendering requires a very fast network and very fast shared storage. See one of my posts on network rendering [link] for more."

For that, I will switch to gigabit Ethernet and on the server, couple of 15K at RAID 1 drives or SSD drives and again on the server a quad-port server nic adapter to allow more bandwidth for the clients' multiple connection to the server both for reading and writing.

[Walter Soyka]"Don't worry about your GPU. Unless you're using a third-party effect that is specifically written for GPU accelerations, AE renders on the CPU only."

I was thinking of a Tesla solution or something like that, which I do not know much about...